RALEIGH (June 19, 2025) – Rep. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth, is the senior chair of the state House committee that will help decide how to spend more than 
$65 billion1 over the next two years.
Before he came to Raleigh, though, Lambeth served as Chair of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board from 1994-2012 and cites education as his passion, even though he spent his career as a hospital administrator. He has daughters who are teachers and grandchildren in public schools.
And this year he is leading a push from the House against the state Senate – both controlled by Republicans – to finally give significant raises to the state’s teachers.
North Carolina ranks 43rd in average teacher pay and 39th in starting teacher pay. One in 10 of the state’s teachers left their jobs last year.2 Hardly something to brag about.
“We’ve fallen behind when you compare us to other Southern states in teacher pay,” Lambeth says in the accompanying video.
“And I hear probably from more parents on that one topic than I hear on any other topic,” he says. “I get a lot of questions about, ‘Do we not value teachers? Do we not realize that we’ve got a problem?’ I do realize that.”
LAMBETH TALKS about visiting other Southern states, but particularly South Carolina last fall.
“South Carolina legislators that I was having dinner with said to me, ‘We’re raising (starting) teacher pay to $47,000.’ We were at $41,000. We are still at $41,000. South Carolina now has gone to $48,500 for beginning teacher pay, with the second year expected to be $50,000.
“So we’re way behind South Carolina, but when you start looking at the other Southern states, we’re well behind the other Southern states as well.”
“I felt like it was a clear embarrassment for North Carolina to be that far below the market,” he says.
Lambeth – who was also instrumental in a long-term effort to get North Carolina to expand eligibility for Medicaid – is a lead sponsor of a bill this year to raise starting teacher pay to $48,000 in 2025-26 and $50,000 in 2026-27.
Even Democratic Gov. Josh Stein praised House Republicans when they included those raises in their version of the 2025-27 state budget.3
WHY IS that important?
“Kids are not going into education – they find other alternatives. Teachers do not feel valued when we don’t at least pay a competitive wage with other states. From the parents’ perspective, they’re getting very concerned about the size of classrooms,” Lambeth says.
Due to the state’s teacher shortage, he says, a granddaughter had 35 students in a fifth-grade class.
“That’s just not acceptable, in my opinion,” Lambeth says.
“We need the support from every citizen who’s focused on teacher pay to help us get this across the finish line so we can get teacher pay up.”
“If we can get teacher pay up… our average increase for teachers would be 8.7% over the biennium. And we haven’t had a decent increase for teachers now in a couple years,” Lambeth says.
“We hope that if we can get this done, you can attract teachers back into the profession,” he says, noting that teaching is a second career for many through lateral-entry programs.
“I think we have a golden opportunity here to get teachers more engaged, feel appreciated, and then try to get some young kids more interested in teaching because it’s a competitive salary, it’s a good job. And then we might be able to move folks into it from other professions. And I think it’s a win-win for everybody.”
Let’s hope he can convince the state Senate of that.
1 https://webservices.ncleg.gov/ViewNewsFile/107/House_Committee_Report_for_5th_edition_2025.
2 https://publicedworks.org/2025/05/nc-teacher-pay-now-ranks-43rd/;
3 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article307014631.html; https://greensboro.com/opinion/column/article_51005b29-af87-41e0-b407-0ca41163be2d.html.
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